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We may be at peak infection: modeller

Australia could be at the peak of its infection rate according to one of the chief modellers of the COVID-19 virus, Melbourne University professor James McCaw.

Releasing the official Doherty Institute epidemiological modelling that has informed the health response to the virus, Professor McCaw said the Doherty team expected to see a further decline in cases.

"There's fewer infections from returning travellers or returning Australians or otherwise. And it looks like community transmission is continuing to be well suppressed. So in that sense, you would say that it looks from a case infection point of view that a peak might have almost passed or it's passing,” Professor McCaw said.

Professor Jodie McVernon said deaths had not been modelled. Alex Ellinghausen

“We will see a surge in hospitalisation in the coming week and then that would die, but of course, we know that our population is still largely susceptible and so if we reduced, if we sort of relaxed and went back to normal, we would see a rapid and explosive resurgence in epidemic activity that would be predicted.”

The modelling done for the federal Department of Health by Melbourne University's Doherty Institute looks at four scenarios: no mitigation, quarantine and isolation – and two versions of quarantine and isolation plus social distancing. The modelling showed the impact on health resources and is based on overseas data.

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Work is now underway using local data to better understand community transmission rates and what the data suggests how best to risk manage the return to normal activities.

The lead author of the modelling, Doherty director of epidemiology, Professor Jodie McVernon, said the work had come from a long experience of planning for pandemic influenza. "We have a long history of preparedness work in collaboration and consultation with government."

Asia Pacific data

Henry Cutler, director of the Macquarie University Centre for the Health Economy, said future modelling of Australia's experience with COVID-19 would be much more instructive.

He said Tuesday's release, based on the best available international data, had helped government gain appreciation of the potential scale and scope of the pandemic.

"We need to reduce uncertainty within the estimates by using Australian input data, before we can gain some confidence that our next decisions are the right ones," Professor Cutler said.

"I think have made a very good start on dealing with this virus, compared to other countries. You can see that the growth in our daily cases is coming down, which is really positive, and it suggests that we are potentially reaching our peak.

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"It seems that we are in control at the moment of COVID-19 in terms of restricting its transmission to ensure our health system can cope with hospitalisations."

UNSW Medical Professor Marylouise McLaws said the model skewed the numbers because it only included numbers from Asia.

"So they looked at China as the main source, but had forgotten that China enjoys Lunar New Year from about the 25th of January for about 16 days and the Chinese are very alike the rest of the world, interconnected as they go and visit family all over the world."

RMIT Professor Mark Osborn expressed disappointment with the release. "There's a little bit more on impact on healthcare impacts (and some more info in the preprint now released) but the basic data was freely available across the media," Professor Osborn said on Twitter.

"In comparison to the UK (which itself isn't encyclopedic), this is very very thin.

"I'm definitely not criticising the scientists, but I think the Australian government approach fails abysmally to meet the request from the Science Academy to provide the evidence for COVID-19 policy"

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Tom Burton has held senior editorial and publishing roles with The Mandarin, The Sydney Morning Herald and as Canberra bureau chief for The Australian Financial Review. He has worked in government, specialising in the communications sector. He has won three Walkley awards. Connect with Tom on Twitter. Email Tom at tom.burton@afr.com

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